If you’re a parent and you’ve been working hard with your child for the past few years, making sure that they will be accepted to a good college, your worst nightmare is for them to drop out their freshmen year. As preposterous as it might sound for a student to throw everything away after all the work that goes into SATs, applications and scholarship interviews, it seems that there’s an undeniably high percentage of college freshmen who simply squander their opportunities. As hard as it may be to cope with, if you’re the parent of such a student, there’s assuredly a number of logical explanations. This is why so many first-year students dropout of college.
They Get Homesick
Your child may have left home for a week here and there to attend summer camp or some kind of workshop, but going away to college is a completely different thing. If they rely on you, their friends, or a romantic partner to get them through life emotionally, they may feel isolated and paralyzed when forced to claim their independence. In this case, it’s usually best for these students to earn their degrees online. For example, if your child wants to earn their business degree from Pepperdine, they can actually do Pepperdine’s MBA online.
They Don’t Like the Dorms
Dorm life is not for everybody, and you want to make sure that your child is ready for it before they make the decision to live in the dorms. Not only do you have to share a room with another person, you have to share a bathroom with the rest of your floor, you often don’t have a kitchen, and it can be difficult to get any peace and quiet. If your child experiences any kind of traumatizing drama with their roommate or dorm mates, you want to make sure they can apply for a transfer before things get too serious.
They Like the Dorms Too Much
Some college students have the opposite problem. These students like the dorms so much that they can find it almost impossible to focus on their studies. This is especially the case at schools that are known for their party culture. If your child makes friends with the wrong people and starts developing any kind of drug addictions, it could put the kibosh on their whole academic career in the blink of an eye.
They’re Not Prepared for the Challenge
If your child was the type of student who was able to breeze through high school without trying much, this early blessing may prove to be a curse in college. College courses are much more demanding than high school courses and if your child isn’t accustomed to making the time for proper study and isn’t willing to revise and rework their writing several times before turning in a paper, they may start to fall behind in their classes. If they can’t accept that their work just simply isn’t good enough for their professors, their own ego might impede them from even getting through the first year.
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